Lewis Carroll is the pen-name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was a lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. Dodgson started the telling of this tale on July 4, 1862 during a rowing boat tour on the Thames River at Oxford. Pastor Robinson Duckworth and three girls were members of the party: Alice Liddell, the ten-year old daughter of the dean of Christ Church, and her sisters Lorina, aged thirteen, and Edith, eight years of age. The poem at the beginning of the story states that the threesome urged Dodgson to tell them a story. And so he set out to present the first version of the tale, admittedly with some initial reluctance. Now and then, within the broader tale, reference is made to all five of the boat party; the story first appeared in print in 1865.

In its dialectal meaning, Picard is the name of an important linguistic family which covers a large territory in the north-west of France and the western part of the Belgian province of Hainaut. It is one of the Romance languages that make up the “langues d’oïl”, such as Lorrain, Champenois, Normand, Poitevin, Walloon etc. In Belgium, four of these families are represented: Lorrain and Champenois in two tiny parts of the province of Luxembourg, Walloon in the larger part of the Francophone area.

Borain Picard is the dialect spoken in what is called “Le Borinage”, an area situated south-west of the capital of the province of Hainaut, not far from the French border. It used to be a coal-mining area, but the last mines closed down about half a century ago.

The language used in this translation is the dialect spoken in the centre of the Borinage area: nine villages with about 100,000 inhabitants. Due to several economic and social changes—and certainly due to compulsory education in French—the Borain dialect, like many other dialects, is dying out in spite of the efforts of some courageous people who are trying to revive it. The number of people who can speak it fluently is not particularly high, but there are still many inhabitants who have a passive knowledge of the dialect. The orthography used here is the “Feller notation”.

The translation of Lewis Carroll’s work was not particularly difficult from a linguistic point of view. The difficulties arose from the puns the author sometimes makes; it is not always possible to reflect this wordplay in another language. But it is not always impossible: e.g. Carroll’s wordplay on the words “lesson” and “lessen” (Chapter IX) can easily be reflected by using the words “cours” and “court”, whereas it was impossible for us to express the idea of madness and stupidity which is suggested by the names of two of the characters “Hatter” and “Hare” (“as mad as a…”), and we chose two names which have a humorous connotation “F’zeû d’ Capiôs” (‘maker of hats’) and “Capuchégn” (sometimes used in Borain, instead of “lièfe” because the fur of a hare is the same colour of the gown of a mendicant friar, i.e. a “capuchégn”.)